Give him a chance, they said. He may surprise you, they said.
In the two weeks since Donald J. Trump has been president of these United States, he hasn’t exactly done that.
But he sure as shit has shocked us.
From declaring himself supreme leader to forging ahead on two controversial pipeline projects to his surrogates having Fun with Orwellianism, he and his administration have been making good on campaign promises that a lot of observers assumed he’d never really carry out — like the ones about building a wall and banning Muslims.
So it seems, shockingly enough, that he really did mean all that crap. Much of what the administration has done in roughly two weeks has not just been symbolic of the ideological split between this administration and the last one; it has concretely and precipitously changed people’s lives.
Given the surprisingly high volume and quick pace of these changes — some to policies we took for granted and some to aspects of our national identity — it’s hard to keep track of them all.
So, in the interests of recording non-alternative facts (albeit with a dollop of attitude), here are the 21 most shocking things that have happened since Jan. 20.
1! Not long after he officially becomes president, Trump sits at the Oval Office desk and signs several executive orders. Though a couple are procedural and pertain to the confirmation of his cabinet nominees, he signs a proclamation declaring Jan. 20 a “National Day of Patriotic Devotion” since that is the day he was inaugurated. It is still unclear whether Kim Jong Un will sue for intellectual property theft.
2! Despite photographic evidence to the contrary, he refuses to acknowledge that more people were in attendance at his predecessor’s inauguration than were at his, and bars the National Park Service, which tweeted the initial side-by-side comparison of the two events, from social media (though on the following Tuesday, some badass rebel out at Badlands National Park tweets about climate change via the park account). A number of “rogue” Twitter handles pop up to ridicule Trump in their place.
3! Two days after his inauguration, his surrogates do battle with the media. Press Secretary Sean Spicer flat-out (and aggressively) lies to the press, presumably because he can’t stand to see his boss cry.
4! Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s former campaign manager and current senior advisor, causes a spike in Amazon sales of George Orwell’s book 1984 on Sunday when she defends Spicer’s lie about the inauguration crowd size as an “alternative fact.” She also threatens to stop granting interviews to Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd because there are only so many synonyms for bullshit.
5! At a meeting with intelligence officials (whom he had compared to Nazi Germany in a tweet), Trump refers to his “running war” with the press, given how they spend so much time doing the jobs they exist to do. He does this while standing in front of a monument dedicated to the memories of fallen agents.
6! Surrounded by top male advisors, Trump reinstates the “global gag” rule, which takes U.S. aid away from any overseas non-governmental organization that even utters the word abortion to a client or patient. These agencies provide crucial health screenings — cancer, HIV and the like — as well as birth control. Reagan initially adopted this rule. Presidents Clinton and Obama each rescinded it, but Presidents Bush II and Trump brought it back because, come on, where else is the next generation of child soldiers going to come from?
7! The internet, thankfully, unearths multiple bizarre tweets Spicer wrote over the course of several years repeatedly blasting the frozen dessert Dippin’ Dots for not really being “the ice cream of the future” as it so proclaims in advertising and marketing materials. Officials from Dippin’ Dots offer to send the White House a shipment of free Dots, but it’s unclear whether Spicer will accept.
8! After getting Bernie bros all excited by officially withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Trump signs executive orders that bring back two extremely controversial pipelines out West, the Keystone Pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline.
9! He makes the Environmental Protection Agency halt all social media updates and bars them from talking to the press, and there are reports of similar decrees for other federal agencies. He also puts a stop to all EPA contracts, hiring and interagency agreements in case any of the science they do gets in the way of mining, extraction, development or anything else that tears up and/or contaminates parts of the planet.
10! Trump says he only lost the popular vote by 3 million because at least 3 million “illegals” voted illegally — a claim for which there is a complete lack of evidence.
11! Disgruntled White House staffers leak hilarious accounts of life in the Trump White House and numerous outlets run with them, including lurid details of bitter rivalries between key staffers like Conway and Spicer. The Trump in these stories is just as childish and self-aggrandizing as the Trump on SNL, obsessing over the millions who participated in women’s marches and tone-deafly hosting a White House screening of Finding Dory, in which Ellen DeGeneres voices an Australian fish separated in her search for her parents by a large wall.
12! Trump decides it’s time to make good on the most asinine campaign trail spittle of all: the Mexican border wall, which he says he’ll get started forthwith. Mexico is still going to pay for it, he says, even though the president of Mexico told him where to cram said border wall. Trump retorts that he is going to pay for the wall by imposing a 20 percent tariff on avocados and the like. The Mexican president basically says Sure, dude and bails on a meeting they had scheduled — which Trump says was, like, totally mutual. (Later the two do have a phone convo, though there’s no word yet on the price of guac.)
13! Perhaps unsettled by all the derisive laughter, Trump decides it’s time to whip out one of his most sinister campaign threats: the “Muslim ban.” While executive orders banning travel from predominantly Muslim countries (but not all of them) don’t technically mention a religion by name, most people recognize that it is, in spirit, a series of actions targeting Muslims. (Bonus: Right around this time, the White House issues a statement recognizing Holocaust Remembrance Day that fails to mention, um, Jews.) Since the administration doesn’t bother to tell any of the agencies who would be charged with handling the consequences of thousands of people being removed from planes, handcuffed, etc., chaos ensues. So, too, does another backlash…
14! An ever-ready bank of energized protesters, whom Trump probably thinks are being paid by George Soros, packs airports and other public areas in protest of Trump’s travel ban. In Tampa, hundreds take to the streets the Sunday evening after the ban takes effect. Local Trump/Conway aficionados in nearby bars shout angrily at the crowd, which has zero effect on the protest but makes the barflies feel better, we guess.
15! As all this is happening, Trump appoints top advisor Steve Bannon (who makes Karl Rove look like Mr. Rogers) to the National Security Council, an entity that has until now been occupied by military officials. Like, Army generals, who tend not to have career trajectories that include masterminding an anti-semitic, white nationalist propaganda website, and whose job it is to sometimes tell a president what he doesn’t want to hear.
6! Spicer retweets what he seems to believe is a flattering glimpse at his years of service, a video called “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Sean Spicer,” put out by The Onion. “You nailed it. Period!” he writes. It is unclear which part he feels they nailed: the part in which they say his “role in the Trump administration will be to provide the American public with robust and clearly articulated misinformation” or the part in which they say he nails the pocket square (which he does).
17! Spicer decides that now is a good time to start talking about crowd sizes again. Nailed it! Way to deflect, bro!
18! Trump announces yet another executive order that echoes yet another campaign trail bellow that seemed funny at the time. For every regulation entities like the Environmental Protection Agency want to pass in order to, oh, I’unno, keep corporate polluters from dumping toxic waste into important waterways or keep JoeBob from macing baby spotted owls, said entity would have to repeal two existing regulations. Because liberal snowflake treehuggers, for some reason, don’t trust that large corporations will willingly invest in environmentally sound methods of production and disposal of byproducts. Alternative fact of the day: Corporations care! Georgia Pacific would love to keep harmful pollutants from nearby waterways, if only the mean government wouldn’t tell them to!
19! Heads are rollin’! Since acting Attorney General Sally Yates (deputy attorney general during the last year and a half of the Obama administration) doesn’t want to enforce an executive order banning, you know, those people from entry to the United States, Trump fires her. Twist: Incoming Attorney General (and U.S. Senator from Alabama) Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III grilled Yates during her 2015 confirmation hearing out of concern that she wouldn’t defy potentially illegal actions the president sought to enact… but you have to remember, there was a much swarthier person in the Oval Office those days.
20! We would be remiss not to include a bright-ish spot here: Amid rumors of some type of LGBTQ-related decree or another, the White House announces it will not reverse any of the Obama administration’s pro-LGBTQ policies. To be sure, Trump has never embraced policies that discriminate against LGBTQ people — not even during a campaign that seemed divisive in almost every other respect. He even uttered the acronym during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, so anyone who calls him a homophobe should probably Google him. However, other actions — his hiring of VP Mike Pence, a proponent of long-debunked conversion therapy; his nomination of Sessions (who has a very anti-LGBTQ record); his staff scrubbing the While House website of language pertaining to equal protections — suggest he’s not surrounded by people who prioritize equality, fairness or protection against discrimination or hate crimes.
21! On Tuesday evening, he announces his nominee for the open U.S. Supreme Court seat left vacant in the wake of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death one year ago, and has stayed vacant because the GOP Senate decided the rules only apply to them when they want them to. Trump's selection is Colorado federal appeals court judge Neil Gorsuch, who falls to the right of even Scalia. The move will likely spark a showdown in the Senate as Democratic leader Chuck Schumer tries to pull a Mitch McConnell on Mitch McConnell. Which comically faulty reasoning will he borrow from Republicans to pull it off? We shall see.
This article appears in Feb 2-9, 2017.